Difficult Days
Hello Sweet Sensitives! Today's writing is about managing the past week's political events in the US, managing interactions with people, and "#freedom." Stay Gold, Kimberly🌷🥀 (Audio too!)
This has been a difficult couple of days as a sensitive person. I vacillate between attempting to calm my nervous system with food, alcohol, sleep, chores, and incessant scrolling, crying, and raging. I want to escape somewhere because my body feels like it’s in danger, even while I sit in my quiet apartment.
To my knowledge, no one is actively trying to kidnap, find, or abuse me. But I feel like it’s imminent.
It’s a sunny, beautiful day where people are walking their dogs, and kids are playing on jungle-gym equipment, and I feel like Sarah Connor in the Terminator movie, where the bomb explodes and burns everyone to ash in one fell swoop. The gnawing feeling of dread as I see our elected officials continue to pass legislation that denigrates and destabilizes our humanity has me prickling with rampant, zig-zagging, debilitating energy.
It's a shame how many people are scared and fearful of the freedom they claim they care about, especially on days like July 4th. Apparently, they want a safe bubble-wrapped freedom without any risk, to the point where they willingly bow to being bought, sold, used, and thrown away by those in power. Ironic, isn’t it?
There’s no reason why we should be so terrified of love and change, yet here we are. The plot has been lost on what freedom means. We like to say “land of the free,” but is it really when people are homeless, kids are hungry, and women can’t control their bodies?
We are cosplaying freedom. America is free and easy for a select few, while everyone else must fight tooth and nail for any advancement in basic decency. Because some privileged people don’t pay attention, they bat their doe eyes in shock when the terror of restriction comes knocking on their door. The investment and hard work that it takes to have real freedom can feel like the hardest workout you’ve ever tried. And we must do that again and again. Freedom isn’t a given, as we are unfortunately seeing played out in real time.
The lack of empathy in this current moment is unbelievable. I’m ashamed of this country right now, if I’m being honest. I keep wishing and hoping things were different. I want people to think for themselves and put love first. Acceptance first.
I had an exchange on social media recently with someone I do not know, who told me he was offended by my using big words he didn’t understand.
“How dare I insult him and make him feel less-than. I was the biggest problem in America.”
When I attempted to engage respectfully with him and explain that is simply how I write and talk, and I have no idea what his knowledge of words is, I was shut down as being woke and elitist.
When did it become wrong to aspire to being educated and well-spoken? Instead of accepting the point I was trying to make at face value, he chose to focus on my wording as a personal attack and to be insulted.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in conversations where I don’t clock every word that’s said, or follow the train of thought, or theories being shared. I never in a million years assumed those people were trying to insult or debase me, or were wrong for the words or phrases they used that I didn’t comprehend. I took it as an opportunity for me to learn, and I didn’t stray from the ultimate point they were trying to make because I didn’t grasp a word or two.
The delicious thing about melting pot societies is that we won’t click, understand, or agree with everyone, but we can get curious and allow for openness for that in which we don’t yet understand. We can even allow for not understanding to be okay. We don’t have to understand everything to make it true. Wowza! ;)
It’s the judgment being thrown around I don’t want. Or people taking out their insecurities and fears on others. That’s when “othering” happens, and the dehumanization grows.
…To swing this back around to my original thought, the downward spiral that we’ve been experiencing has got me hanging on by a thread at times.
The US is in for a great many torturous years, I fear. I feel it in my bones.
I’m being told to fight, rise up, and send money to the supposed ones on the right side of the aisle when all I want to do is disassociate from the clown show currently being acted out.
We are humans evolving, the train has left the station, and there’s no going back. Ever. In any scenario. There is only the present and forward. As intelligent as human beings have the capacity to be, we continue to poison ourselves with the giant mixed bag of chocolate treats that creates sickeningly sweet, delusional, vomit-inducing pain. We choose the devil we know over the unknown and scary promise of lightness, easy digestion, and calm because that means we must feel. We must deal with the hurt and let it move through us without interruption. Wrestle with the acknowledgement that we might be wrong, that what we were taught was wrong, and that we can let go and love. Trust people, care for people, recognize community.
Being the raw gal I am, I must hold on to what is true for my sanity’s sake. Listen to those who will calm my nervous system and take baby steps to keep my head on straight. A tall order when I feel the waves of self-righteous harm crashing down on our collective.
Rest
Restore
Rise
Repeat
Like the cycles of the moon, of my system, of nature
Seeding, Growing, Blooming, Dying
We are at a pivotal stage.
Accept that every flower is different and appreciate them as so, seeing the colors, stems, stamen, and petals, and accepting them all the same.
Or - disease the dirt, turn on nature itself, and die from the nightshade, who will bring us the final lesson borne of our ignorance.
May we see each other as the sunrise every day and turn on its light inside of us.
✌️ Kimberly